


A New Career in a New Town

by VoluptuousPanic



Category: Babylon Berlin (TV)
Genre: Berlin (City), Brooklyn, F/M, Immigration & Emigration, Parenthood, Possible Schmoop, Sexy Eye Bags, Speculation, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-22
Updated: 2019-06-22
Packaged: 2020-05-16 12:28:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19318177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VoluptuousPanic/pseuds/VoluptuousPanic
Summary: The things that happen when you're working on something else and you have to divert to bang out a fandom earworm. We don't know what's going to happen, or how they'll get away or not get away from the inevitable, but sometimes it's nice to think about nice things happening when everything else is harrowing. Charlotte. Gereon. Family. Friends. Brooklyn. 1944-ish. 100% free from plot or dialog.





	A New Career in a New Town

Gereon loved New York. So did Charlotte. Which was a good thing considering they were bound together and to the place by a web of half truths and whole truths and utter inventions and outright lies that were as much a part of them, and considerably more planned but no less cared for and attended to than Lisbet and Anno. Or Libby and Andy as they were known here at school. He didn’t like thinking about the two others that they’d lost, the first one before they’d gotten round to marrying, so quickly they weren't sure, the second one coming too soon, and too soon after Anno, the year they’d gotten out. 

The papers were somewhere in Charlotte’s things, in a small strongbox with the children’s birth certificates, official translations of documents, her growing cache of US war bonds, their letters from the brief time they'd spent apart before they'd wed, and Gereon's service Walther. Some things were even too precious for a safe deposit box at the Emigrant Savings Bank. The papers documented the day in 1940 when Gereon Rath and Charlotte Ritter Rath became Georg and Charlotte Reichert from Köln. Papers delivered in the dead of night: biographical documents, transit visas, exit visas, sealed affidavits, documents prepared at the United States Consulate in Leipzig only days before it closed, and transatlantic tickets for a family of four. All unasked for, but taken as a gift delivered by a familiar face that now wore a black leather coat; chauffeured by a more familiar face in a black uniform and Totenkopf cap. It was the last time Gereon would ever see Lange or Moritz. When they arrived, Gereon was sure they'd come for him. When they left, he threw up, drank half a bottle of cognac, and threw up again, then sat at the kitchen table half laughing, half crying, holding Charlotte, still pregnant then with the child that wasn't to be, and both children in arms that felt feeble. It was now four years later, and he felt a bit stronger, but didn't question the providence of that summer night, and still couldn't quite remember how they'd made it from Berlin to Marseilles during a troop advancement. He suspected then, as he did now, that Helga and Moritz, via their relationship with Nyssen, had a hand in the ease of their departure. 

Georgie Kraut. Georgie Reichert. Georgie had stuck, because he’d answered to it once. But Charlotte called him Gereon at home, and the kids would soon be old enough that he and Charlotte would have to decide what they could tell them, when they could learn more, and what would forever be a secret. They’d settled in Washington Heights after spending a few weeks getting on their feet in Yorkville, after being processed at Ellis Island, easily slipping into what was left of the German community, doing odd jobs and what they could to get by. But the Bund had come knocking just as quickly, with their American accented German, and mission statements and tracts like fascist Jehovah's Witnesses. Gereon had simply told them to fuck themselves, using his newly acquired English, learned as quickly under duress as he’d learned French after Ypres, while Charlotte had stood in the street with Anno on her hip, holding Libby by the hand, and yelling like a Deutsche fishwife until the man and woman from the Bund disappeared around the corner. A report of an unhinged German woman had brought the bulls in blue round to investigate a "domestic." Gereon knew how to deal with their sort and explained haltingly what he felt able to, and that he and Charlotte were unequivocally disinterested in joining the American Nazi party. The officers counseled him to bring his bitch to heel. Charlotte would never be cajoled to obey anyone, least of all Gereon, and she’d been a better cop than they would ever be. 

After the first months, Gereon worked up the nerve to take the train downtown to Grand Central to stand outside the building where Severin worked. Why he could do that, but wouldn't place a telephone call or send a postcard, he didn't know. Possibly a relic of police work and the uncertainties and unintended consequences of once normal activities that they’d lived with since 1933. Severin was older, bigger, almost a real American, but still his brother. Still the same twenty years after he'd left on a mail boat never to return to Germany. Severin's encouragement to come to New Jersey fell on deaf ears, but with his help and a tip from a Polish bricklayer Gereon knew from a job site, within two years Gereon and Charlotte owned a two family row house in Brooklyn in the quiet leafy streets between the synagogue and the pencil factory, had a dachshund called Alfred, and had somehow dodged the Alien Registration Act once the war was on for America in earnest. The last years in Berlin were like a bad dream, and this new world was so simple, even with New York's frenetic pace and grit, living frugally. Though the reality of war grew starker and more grim every day, its real effects were largely out of sight and out of mind. For once, Gereon was glad that he’d seen the back of 40, and though still slim and strong—in fact little had changed but his hair going silver—between his age, a history of shell shock and therapeutic chemical dependency, and a healed bullet wound, he’d likely not pass the physical were there ever need to call men over 40 to draft as there evidently was in the elsewhere that was once home. 

The kids were good. Funny and smart like their mother, though better behaved. They went to school and played in the street, just like real Americans. They both looked like him, but had Charlotte's brown eyes. Neither, however, had any German anymore beyond the occasional noun that Gereon couldn’t let go of: Ei, Schuhe, Bett. Gereon and Charlotte spoke German only when they were alone together, with Severin, or close friends. Charlotte's English was even better than his from having learned together with the children. Thanks to a referral from a friend, Charlotte worked in the offices of the Margaret Sanger Clinic downtown. Thanks to Severin, Gereon found work at New York Life investigating insurance fraud, though it was a far cry from police work. Though on some level he knew he should be offended, he couldn't help but find humor in his colleagues’ assertion that cases he handled were assigned to Gestapo. 

Gereon and Charlotte had a small social circle, but it was likely that way for any parents of small children far away from the family tree: Severin and his wife who had no children; their tenants Ewa and Pawel and their children who lived upstairs and shared the rigorously gardened patch of lawn out back; Uwe and Karin and Leo and Traudel and Traudel's brother Max who they’d met on the the passage over—all intellectuals, all secular Jews with the exception of Uwe, all younger than them. Jazz, detective novels, and Schöneburg had been the currency in their first tentative conversations, and they all spoke English fluently, their invaluable assistance selflessly kind when the devastation they faced was beyond comprehension. They kept in touch and Gereon and Charlotte saw Uwe and Karin when they could. Uwe’s brother, though he was in the Wehrmacht, had made contact with Charlotte’s sister Toni who was a nurse on the Western front. They had that much, but no news of anyone else. They were friendly with their neighbors, with the parents of the children’s school friends, with Pawel’s aunt Maria who watched the children after school, and with the butcher and the baker, though there was no Schwarzbrot or Nusskuchen. 

Charlotte had work friends, and it was just like her to land a job at a place she’d gone for help after they thought, briefly, she was pregnant again. The women Charlotte knew at the clinic were smart and kind and helped her keep her mind occupied, and they were interested in Gereon, or Georgie has he was known there too. That Charlotte was a Berlinerin, born and bred, seemed to be of less importance. Gereon had moments when he felt like an exotic specimen: a real live Rhinelander in the flesh who was a convenient stand-in for all Germans while also a convenient exception. The truth was he was a citified grouch who missed Kreuzberg and the Alex who sometimes just wanted to go back to police work, but was too old and too foreign to start again, and too respectful of rules and order for even beat work in the city. He contented himself with his new work, with the jazz and bop he couldn't get enough of, minding the garden and the peach tree and grafting tomatoes, dogged research of whatever topic the children were interested in, dogged explanation to them of what was happening in the war even thought they were too small to understand, generally being the kind of father he’d never had, and in keeping Charlotte as happy and in love with him as he still was with her. New York was wonderful, but they both missed a Berlin that was long gone.

On mornings they didn't wake to find one child, both children, or Alfred in their bed, they still made love, though now it came with tenderness and intimacy rather than the desperation and hunger that had drawn them together and sustained them for so long. Charlotte still called Gereon a prude because he liked to hear it, though they could make each other shudder speechlessly, and he remained far from catholic about having his face between her legs. Charlotte had always been careful, except in the years that the children came, when having babies was all she felt like she had permission to do, but now she was armed with an arsenal of knowledge that had been only whispers and secrets when she still took dates at Moka Efti. Moka Efti: a world away. They couldn't comfortably afford more children, and what they had between them, just for themselves, was good. Gereon knew how to touch Charlotte, all the different way she'd coaxed him into using his body, and she'd always known how to touch him. He felt no less a man the mornings she breathlessly told him he needed to pull out before it was too late, or any other time their inventiveness and freedom with each other devised some other configuration that ended in a more satisfying way than rotely emptying himself into her. 

For Charlotte, Gereon was different in English, in America. Kinder. Gentler. Humbler somehow. More expressive, soft spoken and thoughtful, rather than terse and brusk, though it may have just been the children. In Berlin and in German she loved him, lusted after him. After all the years, and in English, she loved him more completely. "Mein Mann," she thought to herself sometimes when she looked at him, turning the words in her mouth, sometimes saying them aloud, thinking of how simple and possessive they were, rather than "my husband," or the sterile "spouse." Likewise, when he'd whisper "zieh dich aus," it always seemed to mean something that "take your clothes off" didn't. She also knew Gereon found her new interest in words silly. Many things about him were silly, chiefly now the way that he would read the newspaper or read to the children at the end of his reach, rather than be examined for reading glasses. But his other silliness with the children and Alfred and farcically impotent attempts at establishing order in their home made her smile into her coffee with pride and love. 

Charlotte was flattered that her friends found Gereon handsome. That she did too was given, but he had changed as much as she had, though she knew he couldn't see it. Berlin in the last years had drawn him down, his body and face even leaner, taking the last of what little youthful softness he'd had in his thirties. It had sharpened the bones of his face, but also made his eyes crinkle at the corners and deepened the lines of his smile such that he could no longer hide his humor. Or hide the worry that showed in his eyebrows and downturned mouth when he read the headlines or when the radio was on. The dark circles under his eyes, however, had disappeared with better health and less on his conscience, but it could also be America, or the children. Charlotte felt the same transformation when she examined her body. How carrying four children and becoming a mother twice over had given her breasts at last and made her arms and bottom rounder. She had no complaints, nor did Gereon. 

In Charlotte's handbag was a small leather folio where she kept her savings account book and ration coupons. In a smaller pasteboard gatefold between school portraits of Anno and Libby and a photo of the four of them together on Severin’s stoop was a snapshot taken in Berlin by Stephan Jänicke during the few months he and Gereon had worked together before he was killed. It was Gereon in his beautiful brown tweed suit and fedora and the topcoat that was tailored so precisely it made him look like a big man when he wasn't. He was smoking and wore the almost mischievous half smile that he now reserved almost exclusively for the children. Sometimes she looked at it, and it took her breath away, and she remembered how their eyes had met at the Castle a lifetime ago in a land far away, and how it had been when they'd sought each other out to bang their bodies together. The momentary rush of desire would then be tempered by memories of years of struggle, when the work that had brought them together was taken from her by the very men who'd recognized her abilities, of being pregnant with Libby during Gereon's last period of unreliability and instability before he shook off the morphine, how much Gereon drank and how much Pervitin he took afterwards to dull the fear of leaving the police force to take on private work, and later casual black-marketeering, to make ends meet when he refused to join the party or take the oath when the Berlin police were folded into the SS. How alone they were by the time Anno came, and then the next baby...when friends they'd counted on were no longer safe, how frightened Charlotte was all the time without realizing, because everyone was frightened. How it seemed so long ago, but was a few short years and an ocean away, and their new world was being drawn closer and closer to it. Gereon was more circumspect, and more sanguine. Charlotte loved him for that, but one war had made him the broken man she’d fallen in love with against her better judgment, and another was changing them both. 

Libby and Anno brought Charlotte as much pride as the vocation she’d found helping other women find ways not to have children. She was aware of the contradiction and how relevant the conditions of her own life—first casual prostitution, then police work, then Kinder, Küche, Kirche—were to her calling. She knew where she and Gereon would be had they been more compliant or had fortune not presented itself the way it had. Relief was an insufficient word to describe what she felt when she deposited the children at school in the mornings, and when she saw them disappear around the corner with Gereon or with their friends. They would return home again. So would their father. The children went to public school, and wore whatever clothing they were put in. They would know nothing of uniforms or marches or Hitler-Jugend or Jungmädel. They ran wild in the street in the summer and wiggled at the table and refused vegetables, and talked back to their father, though never to her, and it was glorious. She wished she could capture forever the hot night she'd come home late from seeing Karin to find them sitting on the back stairs together in fading light, laying waste to a watermelon while Alfred lay in the nasturtiums and Glenn Miller blared from someone else's wireless. She'd asked Gereon what he'd fed them for dinner and he pointed wordlessly with his pocketknife to the pile of melon rind and fat black seeds. There was nothing to do but laugh and kiss them all.


End file.
